Diet of people in the past

[Justpastflouch]

I’m interested in history and quite often get recommended history “reels” on social media. A recent set of these has been AI generated animations of people from history (Roman soldier, Julius Caesar, Albert Einstein, immigrant at Ellis Island) and what they would typically eat in a day.

It really brought home how much manufactured crap we as society pump into ourselves. The food was very simple, all natural, not much meat, nothing very sugary. I’ve been cutting back on UPFs and this has given me another boost.

I don’t understand your point about herbs. Mint and parsley for instance are as easy to grow as cabbages - it’s more a question of how you stop mint growing - and countless other herbs grow wild: wild thyme, sweet cicely, sorrel…. Alliums (leeks, garlic, onions) were culturally associated with peasants.
The hedgerows are simply full of flavouring ingredients, for free. Even at times when they struggled to meet their calorie requirement there is no reason to think the medieval peasant diet was flavourless. They weren’t living in a post apocalyptic landscape where nothing grew. The repetitive potato-cabbage-bread diet in England at least (I can’t speak for Ireland) is very much a result of urbanisation where you wouldn’t have had access to land.

I've read Angela's Ashes they didn't have so much as a window box to grow herbs, sometimes they didn't have enough coal for a fire to boil a kettle. The mother (Angela) was also seriously depressed having lost several children to diseases of poverty.

Yes, in Mongolia they drink tea with butter in, instead of milk. Its butter made from yak milk.

I would love to know what its like.

Interesting! There was a craze for something called bulletproof coffee a few years ago where you added butter instead of milk and whizzed it in a blender. I was not convinced. 🤢

Agreed. Localised famines were not uncommon till the 1900s. My family of agricultural labourers moved from rural Norfolk to an industrial city for work.
Also, the diet of the poor in Lark Rise was pretty unexciting.

@soupyspoon they also eat sheep’s eyes, I honestly gagged when I saw a child chewing on one in that Ewan McGregor travelogue.

Yes I was on another thread where I was struggling to think of foods I didnt like, I only have 3, tripe, liver and kidney, however I nearly put eyes as I just know I couldnt, but seeing how I have never tried I didnt put it down.

But I really couldnt.

RedToothbrush’s post about the tall ocean liner gg uncles reminds me of something I read yesterday about the Scarborough tunny fishing. (Basically, for a very short time between the 1930s and 50s there were ginormous bluefin tuna caught off the Yorkshire coast and this attracted rich and famous for the big game fishing.)
Some of the locals fishermen who helped them out on their boats recalled that they would have hampers of luxury food and they would be given the leftovers at the end of the day, which would be a massive deal for hungry fishermen.
But get this. They didn’t eat the tuna, because it just wasn’t part of the usual English diet!

@soupyspoon I had to look away ! Even remembering it now is making me feel weird ! What I didn’t understand was how many there were and what happened to the rest of the sheep unless they dehydrate it somehow.

A relative who is in her 80s recently mentioned that she has always cooked tripe. Her two sons, now in their 50s, absolutely loved it as children. She thought it might have been because she added lots of onions. One son who lives near her is able to get hold of tripe from a wholesale butcher, albeit only in great bulk. The last consignment was a stone in weight - 14lbs, 6.4kg. She has a chest freezer, fortunately. Tripe-loving son is the only one in his household who will eat it so he comes to his Mum's house to get his fix and she is resigned to eating it several nights on the trot to use it all up.

I will eat almost anything but I've never tried tripe (or sheep's eyes, or brains), and I doubt I ever will. I do like liver and kidneys.

My mum cooked tripe and it was disgusting but I had some in Ireland which was delicious.

@soupyspoon this was in the Italian Alps :) I'm tempted to try it, but I think I need to wait for a really cold.day for the full experience.

I had tripe in Italy, wanted to try it but to be honest it was just too much ammonia smell and taste. OH loved it.

He wont be having it here!!!

It was beautifully done, dont get me wrong.

@Justpastflouch if you look at the diet of the rich through history its very different to the diet of the poor. To say thd diet was 'better' ignores the diet of the poor.

I decided I wanted to try tripe for my birthday a few years ago and the only place I could find it was a Chinese restaurant in a university town popular with Chinese students, cooked with a lot of chilli. It was….absolutely fine, but nothing you’d be bothered about eating again.

Brains are lovely btw, all creamy. I love liver but kidneys I can take or leave. Hearts are underrated. Never tried eyes either!

The Kentwell Hall re-enactments came up upthread. I have cooked a little in the posh Tudor kitchen but mostly just eaten the food. I will eat pretty much anything so I am the useful person who can show proper Tudor enthusiasm for offal when everyone else is struggling. As someone mentioned, the food cooked in the kitchen there is very much elite food, though spices did go very much further down the social scale than you might expect.
(I have also been a 17th and 18th century kitchen maid with Ruth Goodman, a very long time ago.)

I wonder if the ammonia was inherent to the tripe or a result of how it was prepared. I believe that in the UK it is heavily bleached.

I didn't know and I found it interesting - actually a lot of SarahandQuack's posts are interesting and I'm glad someone's pointed out that herbs were easy to find or grow in the country before our current nature-depletion.

It's hard to imagine what the country must've looked like that far back in the past. In the last Lark Rise book even, she talks of seeing watercress growing in the stream. I've never seen that! Someone said the diet in Lark Rise was unexciting - yes, very repetitive, but helped by the fathers tending their vegetable gardens every evening. So much of what they are wasn't bought but grown. The family pig, too! And she says at one point that they were never ill - so their diet must've been a good one from that perspective.

Compare their situation with Frank's in Angela's Ashes, which was so desperate precisely because of his useless father (criminally neglectful, I'd say, although laws of that time disagreed) who drank all the family money. His story was not the normal story of the poor around him.

Yes I am very very sensitive to that smell though so it may be me. OH didnt detect it to the degree I did.

I can detect it really strongly in blue cheese for example and people love that.

In the country you would have a root cellar to store veg over the winter. Obviously different in a city.

Canning / bottling would be used to store things long term, pickling and salting were also known preservation techniques. Dehydration and smoking were also known and of course using sugar to make jam and preserves.

I know the average person would not be doing all of these things, the expense of buying jars / sugar / maybe even vinegar would dictate what you could store and how.

Pies started as method to preserve meat on journeys, not that the poor would be travelling by anything but shank's pony.

Although jars are infinitely reusable, even glazed pottery ones, so I think the expense would just be the sugar and salt or vinegar.

I've been making sauerkraut recently, and been amazed how it just creates its own liquid to keep in. One boring looking cabbage, a bit of salt and spice and ten minutes' preparation time and it's a tasty food for a month or more.

If you could make your own alcohol then you could also use it to preserve fruit - probably not a thing you'd be doing if you were very poor though.
(I had fun at Christmas making cherries in brandy).

In the country your 'cottage' would have been a hard earth floor. The history of what we see as cute little cottages is really interesting if you study it

I have started to look for watercress and consequently have started to see it!
We associate it with clear streams but often I have seen it in the place where the spring comes out of the ground in what is overall a muddy lake or stream.
(Would never forage it though beyond tasting a single leaf to check it’s what I think because firstly it’s meant to be high risk for parasites and secondly it’s never growing in such profusion that you could take some without damaging it- it wouldn’t take many people to utterly wipe it out.)

Re peppercorn rent, someone showed me a cumin rent recently (can’t remember if it was 15th or 16th c).
They seem to have been using cumin in insane quantities, too. Perhaps because it tastes nice with all those peas and beans.

I think with industrialisation we've lost a lot of our foraging and food preservation skills.
I will happily eat any plums/apples/blackberries/chestnuts I find on walks but DH (Londoner) doesn't trust them.
I wouldn't trust myself with mushrooms though or the less obvious berries.